In one of the 20th century’s most disastrous collisions of political ideology and science, the Russian botanist Trofim Lysenko steered the USSR’s agricultural research policies to deemphasize the deterministic concepts of Mendelian inheritance. Instead, Lysenko was committed to the idea that, within the space of a single generation, the environment could alter the phenotype of future generations, an idea that is now often (imprecisely) referred to as “Lamarckian” inheritance. In Lysenko’s view, Mendelian inheritance, along with Darwinian evolution, emphasizes competition, whereas he believed that biology was based on cooperation, and that hard work in one generation should rapidly lead to the betterment of the species.
Lysenko was among the most infamous purveyors of the idea that the environment experienced by an organism could influence the phenotype in future generations, and he was rightly denounced as a charlatan because he falsified results in pursuit of his goal. However, the scientific community has discovered over the past few decades that the idea that acquired characters can be inherited may not be completely off the mark. It turns out that epigenetic marks, information not encoded in the genome’s sequence, do respond to environmental conditions within an organism’s lifetime, and recent evidence suggests that such information may be inherited.
[For more of this story, written by Oliver J. Rando, go to http://www.the-scientist.com/?...hosts-in-the-Genome/]
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